Netflix are a streaming company that are always looking to improve, so much so they are giving away a cool $100,000 for any developer that can tweak, tune-up or improve the online cloud based video service they offer.

The prize money is being split into ten x $10,000 prizes which was revealed in a press release by Netflix. They explained, ” Netflix Cloud Prize challenges developers around the world to do their very best to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the Internet, popularly known as cloud computing. Contest submissions will be judged by a panel of experts. All submissions will be available freely to anyone.”

The cloud has been heavily adopted by Netflix and handles all their streaming to PC’s and mobile devices, as well as social integration, bookmarking and personalization.

The cloud based competition entries will be judged by a panel of experts, that include pioneers such as Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Thoughtworks chief scientist Martin Fowler, University of Aarhus developer training expert Aino Corry, and Netflix cloud vice president Yury Izrailevsky.

Speaking about the competition, Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer said, “Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging. No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”

If you want to enter then full details are here and entrants can either put together a program or patch for an existing open source program. You have plenty of time as the closing date is September 15, and the winners will be announced in October at an awards ceremony.